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“Think of them as little cold water faucets along the stream channels. Those places will become increasingly important as an adult salmon comes back up the stream. It can use these cold water stepping stones to get its way up to the spawning beds,” Mauger said. These faucets can be anywhere—crossing state, federal, tribal, and private land, which makes protecting them a complicated task. It’s a problem that conservationists run into at every stage of the salmon’s life cycle, notes Kenai Peninsula Borough’s Land Manager, Marcus Mueller. From the spawning beds to the ocean and back again, salmon unwittingly cross human-drawn boundaries. “There’s a lot of human influence on the salmon journey which becomes important when you want to see that cycle complete and turn around again and continue,” Mueller said. ‘Salmon have a people problem’ Mueller is thinking about how to incorporate the data from the project into land management decisions. Cook Inletkeeper has already piloted a successful protection program for lands with groundwater sources—working with the Kachemak Heritage Land Trust to send information to landowners about the value of their land for salmon and offering to buy it in trust. Another proposed management strategy is maintaining riparian vegetation along stream banks to provide shade during the extended days of the Alaskan summer. But these solutions are not simple to implement. The Kenai Peninsula is a county-level municipality the size of West Virginia, and the people who live in it have diverse, sometimes conflicting perspectives on Alaskan natural resources. Though the state tends towards limited government intervention, Mueller notes there have been past examples of compromise for conservation. With something as culturally important as salmon on the line, he says, people will
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find a way to come together to solve the problem. “Salmon have a people problem,” Mueller said. “And the only way we can figure it out is through conversation. My hope for what comes out of this project is that we move the conversation forward.” Lee has been working to engage the Ninilchik tribe with her project, to help center their voice in the ensuing conversations. On both the Ninilchik and other rivers, Alaska Native tribes have suffered restrictions of their rights to fish because of crashing salmon fisheries, an outcome of excluding tribal input in policy decisions. “There’s a history of extraction of knowledge that we don’t want to be a part of,” Lee said. “If we are going to progress in this project we need the tribe on board.” Her research required access to tribal land, so she has made sure to update tribal leadership on the science, inviting members of the Ninilchik Native Association to project planning meetings and presenting her findings to their council. She also hired a Ninilchik youth intern to help collect samples in the summer of 2021. Dr. Liljedahl hopes to grow the project through new grants, to continue building relationships in the region and gathering more data on the pressure climate change is placing on wild salmon. In the end though, the fate of Alaskan salmon will come down to the willingness of Alaskan people to work through hard conversations—first about land and fisheries management, but eventually, inevitably, about global scale responses to climate change. Because the temperature is going to keep rising, and every degree will make a difference. The Salmon and People project is a multi-year research project into the impacts of climate on salmon and salmon culture in Alaska. It was funded by the Fund For Climate Solutions, an internal granting program that provides resources to cutting-edge projects to get big ideas off the ground.
Unchecked boreal fires are eating into our carbon budget Proper management could be a cost-effective solution Sarah Ruiz
Science Writer
What’s new? A recent paper, published in Science Advances, has found that fires in North American boreal forests have the potential to send 3 percent of the remaining carbon budget up in smoke. The study, led by Dr. Carly Phillips, a fellow with the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) in collaboration with the Woodwell Climate Research Center, Tufts University, the University of California in Los Angeles, and Hamilton College, found that burned area in U.S. and Canadian boreal forests is expected to increase as much as 169 and 150 percent respectively—releasing the equivalent annual emissions of 2.6 billion cars unless fires can be managed. The study found proper fire management offers a costeffective option, sometimes cheaper than existing options, for carbon mitigation. Understanding boreal forest carbon Boreal forests are incredibly carbon rich. They contain roughly two-thirds of global forest carbon and provide insulation that keeps permafrost soils cool. Burned areas are more susceptible to permafrost thaw which could in turn release even more carbon into the atmosphere. Although fires are a natural part of the boreal
above: A managed burn conducted in Alaska / photo by Dale Haggstrom
